


Free As a Labter

by Pridia



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Cross-Posted on FanFiction.Net, Gen, Humor, Magical Creatures, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-11
Updated: 2018-07-30
Packaged: 2018-08-14 11:54:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8012821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pridia/pseuds/Pridia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They have infested Hogwarts, there are thousands of them. They're small, pink and worst of all: immune to magic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Beginning

**Author's Note:**

> I originally started this story without a real plan, in a Dutch lesson. I had to describe a room , I didn't know what to describe so one of my friends suggested something from Harry Potter, this is how the first 2 paragraphs came to existence. About a month ago I came up with the idea of finishing (we never had to finish it, just do it in the class) what I already wrote and came up with the idea of Labters. I translated the first 2 paragraph of my original assignment and worked further on that. This chapter is basically to explain how the plague got in place and what Labter are, the other chapter(s) will be about dealing with them.
> 
> You can read this story on [Fanfiction.net ](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12043323/1/Free-As-A-Labter) as well

I was walking through the castle, I had an exam of Defence Against the Dark Arts next week. I didn't master all the spells yet and had to practice. But there was no-one who wanted to practice with me.

_If I just had something to practice my spells on._

I was pacing up and down in the hallway of the seventh floor while I was thinking of a good place to practice. All of a sudden a door appeared out of nothing! I have been at Hogwarts for six years and I keep getting surprised by all its secrets.

I opened the door and entered the room, it was a big room and it was almost empty. Against the right wall was a bookshelf, in the back in the left corner there were about a dozen cages covered with a blanket, there was a couch next to the fireplace which was located in the middle of the back wall. Against the left wall, there were a few of these dolls with a red ring on the chest, they were all holding some sort of wand.

_I could use this to practice my spells._

I walked towards the bookshelf and looked what sort of books it contained. I discovered that it contained mostly spell books, especially the books that contained the spells that I needed to know for the exam. After examining the bookshelf I went to the fireplace and sat down on the couch, it was very comfortable. but I stood up again nevertheless, I couldn't afford to rest I needed to practice. I walked towards the dolls and got a better look, they had wheels and were made of wood, they had a skeleton like head and looked like they were wearing a robe of some kind. admittedly they were kinda creepy.

I moved one of them in the middle of the room and pulled out my wand and aimed it at the doll.

"Confundus!"

My spell barely managed to push the doll backwards. I sighed if I wanted to pass my test I needed to master all 16 spells, some of them I already mastered, this one I certainly didn't. I started practising

I practised about three hours, by that time I had mastered 3 spells: Confundus, Conjunctivitis and Rictusempra. For the exam I also needed to hit moving targets, these dolls were great to practice on, but they didn't exactly move. I walked towards the cages, I had been curious about what they contained for a while but I had decided to practice first. I removed the blanket and saw what animals were in there. They were Labters, Labters were accidentally created when the wizard Theradel Carldrem was trying some new potion on rats about 2 years ago, one of the few things muggles and wizards had in common was testing things on rats. Labters were pink and were smaller than a rat but bigger than a mouse, despite the fact that they were originally created in a lab they could reproduce naturally, therefore they could really become a plague when they were set free. But the weirdest part about Labters was the fact that they were basically immune to magic, well at least kind of. You could use every curse you could thing of on them and they would get the effect of it, but in 30 minutes to an hour, they would be healed and free of magic like nothing had happened. This made them very effective to practice on. Of course there where rules on which spells you could practise on them, because you weren't allowed to torture them.

I realised that I could practice the spells on them, they were on the list of spells you were allowed to practise on Labters. So I opened three cages, letting the three Labters who were in those cages free. I quickly grabbed my wand and fired Confundus at one of them. It was successful and the Labter really was confused, walking funny and falling down. I laughed triumphantly. Then I noticed the other two Labter escaping through the air shaft in the wall. I ran quickly to the shaft but was too late

"Oh no!"

Two loose Labters were enough to create a plague. I put the confused Labter back in its cage and ran quickly out of the room, if a plague started I didn't want to be the one found responsible for that!

The rest of the week I kept coming back to practice, I had realised that this was the room of requirement and I knew how to find it, the remaining Labters had disappeared and the dolls were moving now. I passed my exam easily. The two missing Labters never showed up again and when I left the castle for the summer holidays I figured that they must've died or something.

I had yet to discover how wrong I was.


	2. Life With Labters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The students are adjusting to the Labters.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by RiverSong98 on Fanfiction.net

When I stepped in the castle after the holidays, I knew how wrong I had been. The thing that made me realise that something was wrong was the fact that I saw more than 20 Labters in the entrance hall. All students were shocked and pointing at them. I gulped as I realised that there were hundreds, maybe even thousands of Labters throughout the school and that this was all my fault. While we walked to the Great Hall, we kept seeing more and more Labters.

 _It's official, this is a plague._ I thought

Most of the students were scared of the Labters, it made sense, Labters were not very well known yet, I suspected that they would suddenly become very well know after this. I was right, I'll wish you good luck finding a witch or wizard who doesn't know about them nowadays.

When I walked into the Great Hall I noticed that the students who did know about the Labters were explaining about them to the other students. I knew that this plague was going to be both irritating and fun, Labters were known for teasing people. I sat down at the Slytherin table, next to my friends. Despite being a Slytherin I have never had a problem with half-blood or muggle-born witches or wizards. In fact, my best friend from Gryffindor is a muggle-born witch.

After I said hello to my friends, the first year students came in for the sorting ceremony. I noticed that most of them looked rather scared, with that I mean more scared than usual.

I am the first to admit that the sorting ceremony is nerve wrecking. It might've been just me since I felt that I didn't fit in any house at the time. Well, if I'm being honest, I'm still not entirely sure that I belong to Slytherin and that says something since I'm in my seventh and therefore last year of Hogwarts.

I suspected that the first year students were more scared than usual because of the Labters plague, most of them had little to no experience with magical creatures and even less with magic itself. It would make sense that they would feel more threatened by the Labters than the students who already learned some magic.

* * *

After the sorting ceremony, Professor McGonagall gave her usual new year speech, in which she mentioned the Labters, she explained what they were and that the teachers were working on a solution to the problem. She told us that we had to try and ignore them.

When the Great Feast was finished we went to our common room in the dungeons. On our way, we found that the Labters had caused a lot of damage throughout the castle. This obviously caused us to except damage in our common room. But what we found there wasn't even close to what we expected. All the couches and rugs had been damaged, obviously nibbled on by Labters, the lamps had fallen on the floor and to keep this story short I'll just say that there was next to nothing left that wasn't destroyed. We sighed, this was going to be a long year if the Labters were this damaging.

We went to our dorms and there we found that the bedding and mattresses of almost every bed had been torn to pieces. Somehow my bed hadn't even the slightest damage. Back then I hadn't known that Labters didn't tease the person who 'gave' them freedom, they had recognised my scent despite the fact that only the two Labters I had set free, had smelled me, but I also learned that Labters inherit the knowledge about scents from their parent. I learnt all this a few weeks later in Care of Magical Creatures.

Surprisingly enough no-one suspected that it was me who started the plague, despite the fact that I was never bothered by the Labters. People probably assumed that I just didn't tell them about my encounters and you won't find me complaining about that, if someone learns that I started this, I'll be in huge trouble.

* * *

In the first weeks, we learned to adapt our life to the Labters, there had been a lot of attempts at catching the Labters, but since they were immune to magic, that didn't exactly go like planned. The pure-bloods had no clue how to handle them without magic, so they were useless in Labter-hunting, unfortunately, that included me. Some muggle-born came with some standard muggle idea of making traps, most of us pure- and half-bloods eventually helped them after they explained to us how they worked. With these traps, we did manage to catch some of the Labters but they reproduced faster than we could catch them.

One of the main victims of the Labters was professor Longbottom, our Herbology teacher. The Labters seemed to be very fond of eating the plants in his classroom for lunch, so professor Longbottom was often required to either cancel our lessons or give us theory and obviously we didn't learn as much as we should during those lessons, because we paid less attention to theory and which idiot learns in their free time? Not counting Rose Granger-Weasley, the daughter of Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley, it's said that she takes after her mother and according to what I've heard of her mother I do believe everyone who claims that.

The Labters also seemed to have a nose for the first year students, they were the main victims under the students. The Labters kept destroying their robes, good thing that they were easily repaired with some magic, unfortunately only fourth year or older students were able to produce the spells needed to do that, so we kept getting bothered by the first year students. The Labters also kept stealing their books and homework, well, if I'm being honest that happened to everyone but me. All teachers had stopped asking about the homework, because almost every lesson about five persons had lost their homework to the Labters, on a good day. All this obviously wasn't good for our learning abilities. I was aiming to get N.E.W.T's in Potions, Charms and DADA and somehow I did manage to keep my grades high enough so I should be able to pass them.

Like I mentioned before the Labters also created fun. They loved poking around in the potions classroom, especially blowing it up. Their best trick was that they once managed to turn our professor into a kangaroo for 6 hours during our lesson. The Labters were also very fond of carrying professor Flitwick around the school on his back. A bit like how ants move rocks. They loved interrupting his lessons that way. I feel a bit sorry for him, though, it was his last year at Hogwarts until he retired and he barely got any rest from the Labters. Sometimes they also carried first or second years or some of the smaller older students. Apparently, they can only carry the smaller wizards and witches.

Well, one thing is certain. With the Labters life in Hogwarts certainly wasn't dull. Not that it has ever been dull at Hogwarts.

But everyone knew that we had to get rid of those Labters eventually.


	3. Stopping the Labters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The end of the Labter plague

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AYAYAYAAAYA.  
> It's been nearly 2 years and I'm here to finish what I started.....  
> Yes yes, I know, I know. I actually abandoned this fic.  
> But it bothered me sitting there on the shelf unfinished.   
> No wait, scrap that, it bothers me sitting on the shelf, this is possibly the worst story I have ever written.  
> Well, unless you count that terrible attempt at writing I made when I was like 11, which I recently found back in my old files *cringes*.  
> Okay, this is the worst story I have actually posted and written in English.  
> Anyway, even though I think that, I didn't want to delete it because, well, it's still my work.  
> So after that decision was made I was extremely bothered by the fact that it was unfinished and that I actually had a vague idea on how to finish it and that it would only take me one more chapter.  
> So, yeah that's what this is, I didn't entirely stick to my original plan, but more about that in the ending notes, let's begin with the chapter.

It had been a long year with the Labters terrorizing the castle, there were three weeks left until the N.E.W.T.s started and to be honest, I was feeling rather confident I would pass them, I had been steadily studying and practising for them during the school year. My discovery of the Room of Requirement last year had really helped in preparing me for my N.E.W.T.s.

I knew that I was one of the few students who were ready for the N.E.W.T.s, the Labters had crushed the motivation of a lot of students. They caused the workload to be a lot higher than it would've been and it would've already been terribly high to begin with. Needless to say, this meant that more students than normal failed their exams.

Anyway, like I just said my chances on passing were still pretty good, I'm pretty sure that the fact that the Labters didn't actually bother me did help.

* * *

I was in the room of requirements experimenting with potions, I really loved brewing and often tried different combinations of ingredients to see what happened, I found that knowing the different reactions to different ingredients and tactics often helped with brewing regular potions, but also it was fun to try and make new potions. Not that I ever had a great success at making them, really, the best thing I have been able to create is an energy-boosting potion, which only really does what it says, it got rather popular among the student body for pulling all-nighters and before everyone asks I do have a patent on it and yes, I also made a nice sum of money on that, enough for me not to worry too much after I leave Hogwarts.

But my biggest achievement on potion making was yet to happen.

I sighed, as I jotted something down. I was trying to develop this potion with the goal of curing hangovers but I couldn't figure it out, I was missing one special aspect that was required for it to work and I had been certain that my current attempt should've done it, but alas it didn't.

Just as I was about to banish the failed brew did I notice about a dozen Labters approaching the table on which I had been brewing and started to drink my potion.

I frowned, potions didn't work on Labters so they only really drank them to tease someone but they shouldn't be able to tease me as I had freed them.

 _Maybe it doesn't count as teasing since I wanted to banish it either way, but still why are they drinking it?_ I frowned in thought, then I noticed something that completely shocked me.

The Labters all collapsed soon after drinking the potion.

 _The potion works on Labters!_ I thought, at a loss for words, good thing though that Labters didn't really care whether you talked to them or not because at that moment I was unable to do so. Not that I would've done it if I had been able to do so, I wasn't crazy enough to talk to Labters, not yet anyway.

I considered the situation for a moment before asking the Room of Requirement for enough cages to put the Labters in and proceeded to put the unconscious Labters in the cages.

In the meantime, I was wondering whether I had made something special.

* * *

As I came to discover in the following week, I had indeed made something special. Originally I had remade the potion to make sure it wasn't a fluke, it wasn't. I did a lot of testing with it, figuring out the best way to use it to catch Labters in the meantime. I had discovered that the Labters would be unconscious for about 45 minutes and that they would still act a bit different for about an hour after waking up again, more importantly, they seemed to be attracted by the potion and they didn't seem to have any long-lasting effects after the potion wore off.

 _This is perfect to solve the Labter plague._ I thought to myself with a smile as I jotted down the last of my observations.

* * *

After the testing was done I introduced it to the L.A.M.E Team, which stood for the Labter Active Migration Emergency Team, who were in charge of the Labter hunt and yes, we did have a team like that with a weird acronym and no, I do not know how they came up with that terrible name.

Anyway, they were overly excited when they realised what my potion did and wanted to ingrain it into their Labter catching schemes.

It was surprising just how well the potion worked with the Labter problem, just after its introduction the amount of Labters caught every day increased tenfold.

After the potion was in widespread use around Hogwarts the number of Labters around the castle dropped quickly and with that the number of pranks they pulled,  _obviously._  Somewhere in the last week before the holidays, the school got declared Labter free.

In the end, I earned an engraved trophy for Special Services and an award from the ministry for discovering  _the_  solution for Labter plagues.

To be completely honest I'm not sure how to feel about the trophy since I was the one who actually let the plague loose in Hogwarts, but I've never said anything about that, I don't really want to go down in history as the guy who caused Hogwarts to be bothered by Labters for a year but made amends by figuring out how to solve the Labter problem for good. Yes, that sounds like a good long title, I would love to be introduced like that at parties.

_Not._

To be honest, I'm not sure why I wrote this all down when I did, this basically is a confession of what I did, but back in my younger days I decided I didn't want this story to be completely forgotten and wrote it down, now on my old day I found it again and decided to hide it in the Hogwarts' library in which you found it and now you know the whole story and I'm trusting you to keep it secret and put this parchment back in the copy of  _Amazing Potions For Everyday Use_  in which you found it so more people can read it.

~Jermey Florence Traley,  _Potions Master_

_6 March, 2158_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So yeah, here it is. the terrible end of this terrible story.  
> My original finishing plan was to have the MC accidentally dropping stuff in a cauldron during detention but that didn't really seem plausible, as the MC would need to re-create what he had made and if you accidentally knock something in a cauldron you probably don't know what you knocked into there and how much of it you knocked into there, so I decided on the plot I decided on.... as that was a lot more likely.  
> As for the name of the MC, I have no idea, it's just a random name because I wanted there to be a name.


End file.
